The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain:
There are souls more sick of pleasure, than you are sick of pain.
There is a stir of unquiet in the air. We have, at last, gotten through an election that is in political terms perhaps the least interesting and impactful of my lifetime--but, in symbolic reality, and, therefore, in real world effects on the psyches and emotional selves and actions of people, among the most extreme. We are living in the greatest Empire the world has ever known; an Empire currently embroiled in two astonishingly bloody proxy wars, wars that our government seems to have little or no interest in controlling or containing or bringing to any kind of conclusion, wars that at this writing continue and escalate and spiral ever downwards, killing thousands of innocents, with no end in sight.
In such a night, what do we dream of? And what troubles our dreams?
I am not going to write, today, about either wars or elections. The suffering and death of the innocent are with God; but if we are to stop the killing, and even the psychological mass-media damage caused by a profoundly silly election, we need to ask ourselves more fundamental questions. We need to ask ourselves, first and foremost, why we are doing what we are doing. For only when we know what we are doing, and why, can we choose to stop doing it.
As I have argued, in recent months, I have seen a vision of the failure of America: a failure born merely of the mainstream, of mass media, of fantasy untethered from reality. The most horrifying thing about present moment is neither Trump nor Kamala's alleged wicked plans to destroy America, but rather their utter lack of any kind of political plans at all; not any particular American hatred or greed or racism or conquest or cowardice manifested in Gaza or Ukraine or Lebanon, but rather our seeming inability to feel anything at all about the wars we pay for and enable, to take any action at all and not contradict it, to take any responsibility at all for the people we have killed and the deeds we ourselves have done: to decide if we are at war with Russia or not, if we want Ukraine to invade Russia or surrender or negotiate or advance or retreat, if we want the government of Israel to keep fighting or stop fighting or expand or retreat, to decide if we want the people of Gaza to live or die or be occupied or be ruled or merely to cease to exist: to have any relationship at all to those who, at least, fight or suffer or hate or fear or die and have some idea why.
The most troubling thing about the present American moment for me has nothing really to do with the election or our limited choice among media figures; it is simply the inability of our rulers and would-be rulers, of all parties and all groupings and all colors, to do anything, say anything, decided on anything for good or ill. A profound paralysis in fact grips our most powerful men, a profound indecision, an inability to grasp reality, an incapacity to evaluate it on any terms whatsoever: a existential vagueness about law, morality, governance, and life itself.
Anyway, all that is to say that today's post will be about two works of art about bored unhappy wealthy attractive white women living in New York City in the past.
